22
Ah, sepulchres, those are called, or tombs, or graves. Well, do you see those mounds, and columns, and pyramids, outside the various city walls? Those are the store-chambers of the dead.
22
Why, they are putting flowers on the stones, and pouring costly essences upon them. And in front of some of the mounds they have piled up faggots, and dug trenches. Look: there is a splendid banquet laid out, and they are burning it all; and pouring wine and mead, I suppose it is, into the trenches! What does it all mean?
22
What satisfaction it affords to their friends in Hades, I am unable to say. But the idea is, that the shades come up, and get as close as they can, and feed upon the savoury steam of the meat, and drink the mead in the trench.
22
Eat and drink, when their skulls are dry bone? But I am wasting my breath: you bring them down every day;— you can say whether they are likely ever to get up again, once they are safely underground! That would be too much of a good thing! You would have your work cut out for you and no mistake, if you had not only to bring them down, but also to take them up again when they wanted a drink. Oh, fools and blockheads! You little know how we arrange matters, or what a gulf is set betwixt the living and the dead! The buried and unburied, both are Death’s. He ranks alike the beggar and the king; Thersites sits by fair-haired Thetis’ son. Naked and withered roam the fleeting shades Together through the fields of asphodel.
22
Bless me, what a deluge of Homer!
23
And now I think of it, I must show you Achilles’s tomb. There it is on the Trojan shore, at Sigeum. “And across the water is Rhoeteum, where Ajax lies buried.
23
Rather small tombs, considering. Now show me the great cities, those that we hear talked about in Hades; Nineveh, Babylon, Mycenae, Cleonae, and Troy itself. I shipped numbers across from there, I remember. For ten years running I had no time to haul my boat up and clean it.
